Companies have conventionally exchanged electronic business information using Electronic Data Interchange (EDI). EDI is a set of protocols that enable the transfer of data between different companies using networks, such as the Internet. Both the United Nations Joint European and North American working party (UN-JEDI) and the American National Standards Institute (ANSI) have developed standards that outline EDI. While EDI has allowed companies to communicate more efficiently than through the use of traditional paper-based communications, smaller companies face challenges to participate in electronic business (or electronic collaboration). These companies need to invest in complex and expensive computer systems to be installed at local computers, or to register with marketplaces at remote computers accessible through the Internet. In either case, the companies are bound by the particulars of the local or remote computer systems. Changes lead to further costs for software, hardware, user training, registration, and the like.
More recently, the development of the Extensible Markup Language (XML) has offered an alternative way to define formats for exchanging business data. XML provides a syntax that can be used to enable more open and flexible applications for conducting electronic business transactions, but does not provide standardized semantics for messages used in business processes. Initiatives to define standardized frameworks for using XML to exchange electronic business data have produced specifications such as the Electronic Business Extensible Markup Language (ebXML) Core Components Technical Specification (CCTS) and ISO 11179, a portion of which is incorporated in ebXML CCTS.
Two of the components that ebXML CCTS describes are data types and data elements. The data elements, such as Basic Business Information Entities (BBIEs), are based on the data types, which define the values which may be assigned to the BBIEs. Definitions describing attributes of the data types and BBIEs may be stored in a repository for future use. Users may search the repository using a data type or BBIE name. Standard naming conventions and definition guidelines for the data types and data elements are not specified in some regards by the ebXML CCTS, which results in inconsistent names and attribute definitions. For example, two users may create BBIE names using two different methods. In another example, different users may restrict similarly modified data types in inconsistent ways. The inconsistent definition of data types decreases the ability of businesses to exchange BBIEs based on the data types because the limits of the value ranges are more uncertain.
Additionally, the names of objects instantiated using the definitions in the repository may be inconsistent, which may cause difficulty in cross-business communication because the different naming conventions and attribute definitions may lead to system communication incompatibility and user confusion.